ISSA conference Dallas

GeekyChick

Anyone going? Want to meet up?

dmoore44

I'm taking a pass on this year's ISSA - it didn't look terribly interesting. Not enough technical content to hold my interest.

GeekyChick

Thanks for your reply. I'm a newbie so it all looked good to me. I was particularly interested in the career booth. Hope it's not a let down. I did get a free pass from tweeting about it. I still have to pay lodging+airfare but that's ok.

dmoore44

In the earlier stages of my career, I would have been interested - any information you can get your hands on is good information. And the earlier you start identifying those things that are interesting to you, the more time you can devote to mastering them.

The most frustrating aspect to some of these events organized by security organizations (i.e. ISSA, ISC2, ISACA, etc...) is that they tend to keep the talks at too high a level. There are definitely some interesting breakout sessions going on - the "Cyber Fraud Hunt Operations—Case Study Analysis", "Self-Learning Defense – Identifying Early-Stage Threats with an Enterprise Immune System", and "Tracking Down the Cyber Criminals: Revealing Malicious Infrastructure" talks piqued my interest, but two of those are sponsored, which means that they're going to heavily feature vendor tools rather than being tool agnostic. If you're interested in the operations side of security, I'd try to make those sessions as they'll give you food for thought.

The one thing that really appealed to me was that they're offering an after-hours CTF event at Reunion Tower - that would definitely be worth attending.

GeekyChick

I did notice they had the level of training listed by the breakout sessions. Most probably were higher level, but there was at least one entry level per session. Yes, I'm going to the Reunion Tower after-hours. Hoping some kind soul will show me how to Capture the Flag. Thank you so much for the info! I'm going to checkout those sessions.

dmoore44

As an aside, if you're looking for additional Security Conferences to attend, I'd suggest giving the Usenix Enigma Conference a look: https://www.usenix.org/conference/enigma2017

Enigma 2017 will run from 30 Jan to 01 FEB 2017 in Oakland, CA. If your employer doesn't have the budget to send you, the conference hosts do have a "Grants for Women" initiative that you might find helpful (I'm assuming it might be helpful based on your username...). There were some absolutely fascinating talks given at Enigma 2016, and the 2017 iteration looks to be interesting too.

Edit: I don't know why the final post keeps eliminating the space between the first two words of my posts... That's odd. Anyway, I don't have bad grammar or punctuation... it's just an oddity, it seems.

GeekyChick

I just looked at the Enigma conference website. It has a little edge to it which I like but not as much as Def Con. Yes, you're right, I'm a woman. I've found there's a definite advantage being a woman in this field as you can see by the "Grants for Women". It works for me. �� Followed you on twitter. Thanks for your help!